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Geoff Elwell, Private Eye

 

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|Miniserver™ technology|

The basis of Miniserver™ virtual machines

All of our Miniserver™ virtual machines use Xen which is an open source virtual machine monitor or hypervisor developed by the University of Cambridge as well as IBM, Microsoft and Intel. Originally the main goal of the design and development was being able to run up to a hundred full-featured OS instances on a single computer or server. Xen provides secure isolation, resource control, quality of service guarantees and also protects each individual account on the system. The advantages of having this technology are plain and for applications such as web hosting were server load and higher amounts of processor or memory power are not needed the benefits and cost savings are huge.

More information on Xen is available on the University of Cambridge Xen Home Page.

Why are Miniserver™ VMs better

One reason that Xen is more effective than commercial programmes like Virtuozzo is that operating systems must be explicitly modified to run on Xen, this enables Xen to achieve high-performance virtualization and also prevent any sharing or memory, processes or having any individual account on the server disrupting any others. Xen also allocates each account on the system its own sub kernel making it at an operational OS level a dedicated machine. This means should one Account fail or crash the others would continue unaffected. Virtuozzo on the other hand rely on the services of a single kernel, all of the VPSs on a given server must run basically the same operating system. Another major issue for Virtuozzo is reliance on a single kernel. Should the underlying OS kernel fail, all VPSs running on the server would be brought down as a result.

Xen uses a technique called paravirtualization to achieve high performance (typical performance penalties are around 2%), at the other end of the spectrum, emulation solutions entail performance penalties of around 20%.

Memset was the first UK server hosting company to offer virtual dedicated server hosting and after extensive testing we opted for using Xen even though we had to do a reasonable amount of bespoke work ourselves to port Linux operating systems to the server. We have maintained our position as the UK leader in commercial virtual machine technology. Many other hosting companies have now jumped on the virtual server band-wagon and most of these have decided to use Virtuozzo. That is because it is very easy to set up, administer and also allows them to put up to sixty accounts on one server. We only put 5-10 Virtual Machines accounts on each physical server and as a result performance and uptime is excellent.

Another important consideration is that because Xen is open source unlike Virtuozzo we can keep the costs of our Miniservers lower and we do not need to put a large amount of Accounts on a Server to cover our underlying costs.

Miniserver™ VMs offer improved security

Open source advantage & the future

Being open source Xen also allows us to offer customers the ability to manage and change their Kernels and also as Xen supports different operating systems on the same server we can offer customers the choice of either Debian or Fedora as underlying Linux OS. In terms of Windows Support for Miniserver™ VMs, currently Xen does support Windows operating systems but Licensing issues have prevented this from being taken any further. We do however expect Xen to offer Windows Support for Miniservers very soon indeed now that Dell are supplying server with the new Intel Virtualization Technology enabled chips, so watch this space!

Key benefits to our customers

Our Miniserver™ technology allows us to give you, the customer, a number of benefits but without the costs of a whole physical dedicated server: